kristina grob

Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle

beth — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

A giant hot pink book filled with nearly 500 pages of letters, emails, and images, when merely considered as an object, Kristine Stiles’s compilation of of artist Carolee Schneemann’s correspondence is intimidating, impressive, and a little bit sexy. The material is no less overwhelming.

Carolee Schneemann is an artist whose art played with the boundaries of bodies and embodiment, and of taboo and the abject. She produced physical and performance art, and used her own (often nude) body in the production of her art. She has been claimed as a feminist artistic icon (and acknowledges this herself) despite mixed reactions from feminists to her work.

Kristine Stiles offers a wonderfully clear and helpful preface in which she describes the principles she used when editing and annotating Schneemann’s letters so that they could be presented in book form. Although editing would be necessary even if Schneemann had written the most regular and conventional of letters, Stiles explains her commitment to preserving the irregularities within Schneemann’s letters. Such irregularities include those of spelling and misspelling, word and sentence spacing, and the use of columns and marginalia. Stiles makes a great effort to preserve for the reader as much of the aesthetic experience of reading letters and notes written by a prolific artist as can be preserved in book format.

The letters themselves are an education. They are an education in art, in second-wave feminism, in the changes in epistolary conventions. I confess, I haven’t read them all. It seems too cruel to have done so: dipping in and out of them, starting at the beginning, working through in order while also opening up at random and reading anything that catches my eye is so satisfying I can’t make myself speed read to the end. And I don’t want it to end. As long as there are letters to read, then it seems as though she—as the character I am coming to know, and not as the still-alive woman I will never meet—is still vibrant and alive and working and loving and creating. I am inspired to send real paper letters to my friends, hundreds of letters, so that they can experience me (and I them) through the medium of letter writing. Schneemann has a variety of artistic media at her disposal and letter writing is only one of them. This book is no less a work of art than her other artistic endeavors.

A perfect gift for art lovers, feminist artists, and art historians, this book has appeal for for those interested in seeing the way a life unfolds in the compilation of more than forty years of letters.

Written by: kristina grob, March 29th 2011

My Sister Chaos

farhana — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Laura Fergus

Spinifex Press

A woman leaves her country at the last minute, as a refugee in a civil war. She and her sister leave together and seek asylum in a new country where they will continue their lives. Laura Fergus’s wonderful first novel takes up the story of this woman (I) and her sister (the sister). We do not learn the sisters’ names. We do learn that they are twins and that they are no longer very young. We do not learn the country from which they came nor the country in which they sought asylum. We do not learn the city in which they live. We do not learn the name of the war that scarred them.

The story begins in Chapter 1 with our main narrator, the cartographer—the sister identified with “I.” We eventually learn that she is a highly skilled cartographer, and was well-respected in her native country. In her new country, she works at a level well below that from which she came. Her detachment from her job and her isolation afford her a great deal of time for her pet project: she is creating a map of her house.

Her map is of a specific kind: she is not simply drawing her house and its contents to scale. She has designated her drafting table as her Point of Beginning and she draws from that point to create her map. This means that, from that point, she measures distances and angles which, when completed, must add up to the whole with nothing missing and nothing left over. This kind of measuring can take into account previous boundaries, as well as histories of change and movement. As the story progresses, we find our protagonist agonizing over how to do just this. Beginning in Chapter 1 (the reader’s point of beginning, of a sort), the cartographer must find a way to include her sister and her sister’s chaos into the map she is making.

We do not meet the sister herself until the second part of the book. The sister’s chapters are fractions. We meet her in Chapter 12.5. She is not a whole number. The sister’s story is only ever mediated to us via her sister or an unknown narrator. However, it is the sister who reveals the cartographer and her map to us and to the cartographer. The cartographer herself, we learn, is herself not a whole number. In Chapter 21.75, the cartographer has a flashback. Her past comes creeping in and exceeds the precision the cartographer seeks. As the story progresses, the chapter numbers become increasingly fractured as the maps and the house and the sisters are found to exceed the sum of their measures. The cartographer abandons her map and begins to cut apart her house so it can match the map; the sister takes up the map and paints a new one. At the end of the book, the sisters have taken up the common project of destroying and recreating the house from the inside.

I cannot do justice to this book in such small space. It is marvelous. I’m still not sure I fully understand it, but it kept me up all night the night I read it and I look forward to rereading it.

Written by: kristina grob, January 13th 2011

Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms

farhana — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Ralph Keyes

Little Brown and Company

Ralph Keyes’s Euphemania is so poorly written that, in spite of the rich and interesting subject matter, it is difficult to read.

On the one hand, Keyes insists that euphemisms—circumlocutionary words and phrases—signal both the pliancy and richness possible in human languages and the creativity of the human mind. On the other hand, he claims that by replacing strong clear words with softer and often foreign ones, our language is thereby made sterile and weak. Here he comes close to George Orwell’s famous (and better written and much more convincing) rant against dead metaphors and fancy Latinate replacement for simple Anglo-Saxon words in the English language. Keyes appears to attempt to make this point about language generally—not about the English languages specifically—and so bounces back and forth between endorsing and bemoaning the creation and use of euphemistic language.

When tracing the genealogy of families of euphemisms, Keyes offers confused and misleading information. For example, when writing about the status of children born to unmarried parents, Keyes equates the concepts of “bastard” and “legitimacy” with “child of sin.” That is to say, he squashes a lineage of concepts involving legal rights, inheritance, property laws, and status and a lineage of concepts involving metaphysics, sin, religious feeling, and moral commandments together as though there were no distinction.

The problems I have briefly noted are annoying and unfortunate. However, Keyes’s attitude toward women throughout his book is plainly offensive. What does Keyes mean to imply about the English Queen Victoria when he says she “was hardly dutiful”? Earlier in the book he explained that “duty” was an old Roman euphemism for sex—but the mother of nine children certainly “did her duty.” Earlier on the page, he mentions a “certain kind of dutiful sex”—is he implying that Victoria was a firecracker in the sack? How on earth would he know? Physical size and shape are prime targets for euphemistic language. Keyes, introducing the euphemism “Rubenesque,” tells us that the women Rubens painted would now be considered “candidates for gastric bypass.” This tells us far more about Keyes’s repulsion toward larger women than it does about Rubens’s art. When discussing words for genitalia, it becomes clear that Keyes is clueless about women’s anatomy: he claims that the offensive term “pudenda” (indicating shamefulness) is the “overall” term for women’s genitals, comprising, among other things, the vulva. Keyes is apparently unaware of the equivalence of vulva and pudenda, and of the preference for vulva.

Overall, this book is a waste of time. Do not put it on your shopping list. Do not give it to anyone who appreciates good writing, clear thinking or accuracy. Above all, do not give it to anyone who likes, supports, understands, or cares about women.

Written by: kristina grob, January 12th 2011

Iona Dreaming: The Healing Power of Place

caitlin — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Clare Cooper Marcus

Red Wheel Weiser

I felt deeply uncomfortable while reading Clare Cooper Marcus’ Iona Dreaming. Too uncomfortable, I thought—like eavesdropping on a stranger’s conversation with a long-lost friend.

Clare Cooper Marcus writes about a six-month, mostly solitary retreat spent on the small Scottish island of Iona. Twice a survivor of cancer, semi-retired academic professor, avid gardener, single mother of two, and author of several books, Marcus removes herself to Iona to focus on healing. In this book, she reflects on that experience and connects it to her wartime childhood spent in the English countryside, her experiences as a young wife and mother, and her cancer diagnoses and treatments. Throughout, Marcus crafts little vignettes and narratives from her adventures on the island, taking us through her brief stint as a waitress in a hotel café, long walks around the entire island, a run-in with bird-watchers, laundry day, and an encounter with the fairies.

If my brief description of the scope of Iona Dreaming leads you to believe it is incoherent, then the fault is my own, not Marcus’ prose. Even though the content of the book spans nearly her entire lifetime, Marcus’ writing conveys quiet and solitude. While reading, I often had the strange feeling that I was inhabiting Marcus’ innermost thoughts.

The intimacy of Marcus’ writing made me very uncomfortable when I first began the book, but by the time I finished it, I was grateful for it. First, I was delighted by the way she writes the island of Iona. Marcus’ academic work focuses on sense of place, and she writes about particular places with sensitivity and conviction. Second, Marcus writes herself with as much openness and sensitivity as she writes about Iona. I thought this an incredible connection and analogy: to think of oneself as a location or as a place.

While reading Iona Dreaming, it occurred to me that it could be very enlightening to consider how one conceives relationships to the external world in light of how one considers relationships to oneself: is the world (or oneself) an undisciplined thing to be mastered, or a natural thing to be appreciated? Feminists have written about the self and feminists have written about nature, but feminist work on place and on self with place could be quite fruitful. Though Marcus doesn’t say much about her relationship to feminism or to feminist thought, her lovely memoir may certainly provoke important feminist work in that area.

Written by: kristina grob, October 21st 2010

With Friends Like These

caitlin — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Sally Koslow

Ballantine Books

Sally Koslow’s With Friends Like These is mostly predictable. The main characters—a group of four women who are each others’ best friends—are often caricatures, and there is nothing terribly new or innovative about the story. Still, I didn’t dislike the book (except for the ending, which was terribly trite) and may even read it again.

Why, you may ask, would I reread a book I just called trite and predictable? What Koslow's book does manage to show, if imperfectly, and not always believably, is a group of girlfriends who forge friendships that span young adulthood to real grown-up-hood. Moreover, these women hurt each other. They fail to respond to each others’ needs. They mess up. They even have a hard time forgiving one another.

We need more stories about friendships that are imperfect, that do not meet all of our needs all the time, and that grow and wane and shift and stretch and learn to accommodate. As girls and women, we need stories about friendships with women that are resilient enough to bear criticism, pain, and cruelty—as well as happiness, praise, and kindness. Although Koslow’s characters sometimes appear to have been pulled from some bin of clichés, Koslow does not shy away from depicting anger, disappointment, hurt feelings, and grudge-holding. Although the ending is too neat and slightly purple, the mere fact that Koslow points to reconciliations that do not depend upon forgetting a hurtful past should earn her points for trying.

As feminists, and inheritors to pro-woman social action, it can be very difficult for women to develop healthy ways of being critical of one another. Being critical of women is often (mis)interpreted as not supporting women, as not supporting women’s choices, as being anti-woman, anti-feminist, or anti-equality. It can be easier to quietly drop a friendship than to tell a friend, “You really screwed things up between us and I am really, really angry and hurt by your actions.” Telling a woman she’s screwed up doesn’t fit into certain conceptions of feminism (as I am learning), or perhaps it is better to say that it rests in a panicked tension with certain conceptions of feminism.

This is why I enjoyed With Friends Like These. It shows women who aren’t afraid to screw up, who are afraid to admit they’ve screwed up, who are held responsible but don’t want to be held responsible, and who eventually learn that being a grown-up and being a real friend both entail confidence, vulnerability, humility, and compromise. I hope that one day I can have friends as “fake” as these—who will tell me I messed up when I mess up and who will, eventually, love me anyway.

Written by: kristina grob, October 21st 2010

Blame

admin — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Michelle Huneven

Picador

Michelle Huneven’s Blame spans twenty years in fewer than 300 pages but avoids any frantic pacing or strange leaps. Patsy MacLemoore, the main character, is an alcoholic. A young academic, her scholarly accomplishments initially help to balance negative effects of her alcoholism. Huneven’s protagonist has a professorship at a at a small liberal arts college. She had a small but sunny house, friends, family nearby, and was pretty, with long blonde hair, long tanned legs and a dazzling smile. At the county jail, the regular inmates call her “Professor” when she wakes up there after having had too much to drink.

When Patsy wakes up in jail—again—she assumes she’d simply had too much to drink; perhaps she’d driven even though her license had been revoked. She tries joking with the officers, the lawyers. She’d blacked out—again—and doesn’t know what she’d done to land in jail. “What is it?” she asks, “I really don’t remember. Did I kill someone?” She’s joking. Then they read her the police report. A mother and daughter, killed in her driveway, hit by a car.

Patsy pleads guilty and goes to prison. Huneven’s depiction of prison is sobering and not heavy-handed. She doesn’t romanticize Patsy’s prison experience, but neither does she withhold from her readers the moments of grace Patsy does experience there. In prison, Patsy sobers up, leaves prison and returns to town.

Patsy loses many friends, but miraculously (isn’t friendship and forgiveness always a miracle?), she is not left completely alone. Her ex-boyfriend visits her every week, becoming one of her most faithful and loyal friends. Her parents are gentle with her. Her brother looks out for her. When she leaves prison, she comes home to an apartment lovingly appointed by her best friend and his boyfriend. She meets an older man in AA and remains sober, gets married. Many years later, Patsy learns what happened when she blacked out in the car that night. That new information changes Patsy’s new and hard-won self-perception.

I didn’t want this book to end. The story isn’t incomplete, not by any means. Huneven’s feel for just the right bit of detail was wonderfully effective. I felt attached to these characters, their lives and stories, their back-stories, and their private moments very early on and simply wanted even more by the time the book ended. I loved them. I loved the depth with which Huneven wrote them. I am a sucker for stories depicting people who are deeply flawed but who are nevertheless very much loved. This was one of those stories and I hope to find another one like it again.

Written by: kristina grob, August 8th 2010

A Kind of Intimacy

admin — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Jenn Ashworth

Europa Editions

In Jenn Ashworth’s debut novel, A Kind of Intimacy, the reader follows a few weeks of Annie's life. Annie is not exactly a well person. She doesn’t have much going for her either. Her father was abusive and she married early partly to leave home and partly because she doesn’t have anything better to do. She was lucky, more or less, to have met someone who could support her, who wanted to do so, who was kind, and whose worst faults were tending toward the cheap side of thrifty and wanting to have children.

Eventually the demands of family life get to Annie. She kills her husband and their baby and moves into a new house across town with little more than her cat (to whom she is attached), a trove of self-help books, and a "File" into which she organizes the wisdom from the books into an elaborate system of cross-references she can apply to daily situations. For example, how to get her neighbor’s live-in girlfriend, Lucy, out of the way so that they can realize their destined Great Love. Obviously, this doesn’t go over very well.

The fact that Annie’s perspective on, well, everything is terribly and tragically wrong slips by most of the characters until it is nearly too late. The reader, however, is permitted access to Annie’s mind. At her housewarming party, Lucy, who is young and occasionally manifests the snobbery of youth, opens a bottle of wine, pours it into a glass, swirls it around, sniffs it and then drinks. Annie sees this and wonders, scornfully, “Did she think I was going to poison her or something?” I think, for me, that was when it clicked, when I got my first jolting sense of what it was like to be Annie. The world, for her, is a somewhat bewildering place where everyone but her seems to have attended some secret meeting where they learned all the rituals and understandings that would mark them off as normal, lovable, sane and special. Annie has missed this meeting but believes she knows enough about it to resent it. Annie also doesn’t doubt her grasp on reality and trusts herself to assess the world accurately.

This is an impressive first novel. There are a few editorial errors: a dress (one important to the plot) turns into a pair of jeans and a minor character’s name changes over the course of a few pages. These are insignificant oversights. Ashworth successfully puts her reader in Annie’s place and, amazingly, the reader is able to see the plausibility—from Annie’s perspective—of Annie’s thoughts and judgments. The reader also sees just how wrong Annie gets it, cringes at and for her. I admit, I found the novel a bit stressful sometimes. There was no flaw or shortcoming in the story or its presentation; noting the chasm between Annie’s perspective and my own induced an intense sense of vertigo.

Written by: kristina grob, August 7th 2010

Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Mark Garrett Cooper

University of Illinois Press

In Universal Women, Professor Cooper launches a multidisciplinary investigation into the mystery of why it was that Universal Film Manufacturing Company broadly supported women directors during the 1910s before abruptly reversing the policy. Drawing on philosophical, sociological, historical and structuralist interpretations of gender, culture, power, and institutions, Cooper’s study is positioned to show the interrelationship between art and the development of social norms, aesthetics, and political upheaval, and culture and epistemology in the United States.

However, readers looking for a narrative account of women director’s success and subsequent exile from Universal should look elsewhere. Cooper sets up his project by describing a confluence of events and personalities, some of which appear to be only distantly related, that played varying roles in this drama of gender. Some of these are not clearly explained, as when Professor Cooper explains the etymology of a word but does not clearly tie his explanation to the relationship he is trying to describe and defend.

His definitions and explanations take the following pattern: first, Cooper defines a word like “institution” or “organization” with an appeal to the Oxford English Dictionary. He appeals to the historical use of words to explore the concepts that fall under the definition and to point to a kind of etymological necessity: the word organization brings with it an inheritance from biology and so organizations are implicitly naturalized. Then he describes the word in its social development and practical usage. In the case of “organization” Cooper describes different sociological invocations of the word-concept.

Although in the next section, Professor Cooper describes the bi-coastal organization of Universal Film Manufacturing Company, he does not tie this historical description to the linguistic, historical and sociological discussion that preceded it. It seems that the reader is meant to intuit his purposes in such places and to develop the claims herself. I am not opposed to writing styles that foster critical thinking. But Cooper doesn’t make clear his purposes in so defining and explaining (for example). That is to say, I can look up definitions. I have access to the OED. I can read Durkheim and Weber. But I can’t get inside Cooper’s head to figure out what it is he intends by these things.

Reading Cooper’s book is a bit like watching someone’s film depicting a movie being made: it is interesting to see all the “extras” around the set–the camera crew, the lighting, the onlookers, the caterers, the director and producers and the landscape behind the backdrops and facades–but it is difficult to follow the plot of the movie being made.

The book is directed toward an academic audience; readers should be advised to plant their pinkies in the endnotes for quick reference. It will be most intelligible to those trained in film studies or who are such avid consumers of early Hollywood films and trivia that the characters are familiar–I had a hard time keeping track of names. The study is an interesting one, stressing the role that Universal played in interpreting and then enforcing what it means to be gendered as a man or as a woman. It would be interesting to see a slightly more narrative treatment of the subject–even a narrative that made clear the difficulties of narrative for such a diffuse phenomenon as the shifting meanings of gender–in order to appeal to more non-specialists.

Written by: kristina grob, July 6th 2010

The Uterine Health Companion: A Holistic Guide to Lifelong Wellness

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 07:44:00 +0000

By Eve Agee

Celestial Arts

In The Uterine Health Companion, Eve Agee brings her training as a medical anthropologist and as a holistic healer to bear on the subject of life-long uterine health. She begins the book by explaining both holistic health and the structure and function of the uterus to her readers. Then she outlines a plan for optimal uterine health, with chapters on emotional/spiritual and mental health, the power of nutrition and the importance of a strong body.

In part three, Agee discusses what she calls “Uterine Health Conditions” and these span from menarche to menopause and beyond. This is a book for women at every stage of reproductive life. This is also a book for Western women specifically.

Agee’s training in Africa has led her to question the disproportionate distribution of uterine maladies from a global perspective. Without ever insinuating that western women have their menstrual woes all in our heads (so common to masculinist approaches to women’s reproductive health, as I’m sure most of you are aware), Agee asks why it is that PMS, endometriosis and hot flashes (to name some examples) are so prevalent in the west but comparatively minimal in the non-western world. Agee indicates that dominant western attitudes about women’s bodies and women’s reproductive systems and abilities have actually contributed to menstrual, reproductive and menopausal illness in the western world. I found that to be the most interesting thing about her book.

I can’t say I learned much about the nature of uterine health conditions or about things to do for optimal uterine health, but I’m a reproductive health geek, so I came to the book with a fair amount of knowledge. Still, the reminder to eat my orange and red veggies was a good one and encouragement to keep up on exercise is always appreciated. The part I just couldn’t do was the holistic bit: I just couldn’t bring myself to do the guided visualizations. Certainly, that had more to do with my own comfort zones. Still, I just wasn’t prepared to enter my uterus and talk to the people/things I met there (though it was fun to tell my mother do to so).

Agee’s style is engaging and easy without being overly simple. A quick read, enjoyable and timely.

Written by: kristina grob, July 1st 2010

All the Living

admin — Mon, 03 May 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By C. E. Morgan

Picador

It doesn’t take much of a search to learn that All the Living by C. E. Morgan has been very well-reviewed. The story itself is simple: girl and boy meet; event pushes them toward a commitment neither of them had thought through; life gets rough and someone thinks about finding a way out; a certain kind of intimate conversation between girl and boy becomes possible as a result of the difficulties they learn to endure together.

But for all the simplicity of the basic story, there is a kind of fresh music in the characters’ names: Aloma, Orren, and Bell. The names sound improbably foreign to my contemporary, urban ears. It is possible that I don’t typically think about my own urbanity until some shock moves me to confront myself. This novel was just such a shock.

I’ve lived in the Midwest—along the very same Great Lake, in fact—all my life. Hills—real ones—are exciting and exotic to me, but mountains, I realize, are the stuff of fairy tales. Mountains are an event, a vacation, a dreamworld, an aberration. A mountain could only be wonderful or terrifying. There is nothing mundane—to me—about a mountain.

To Aloma, the mountains are stifling and oppressive. Indeed, they are almost as much a character in the novel as the humans who live within them. Aloma dreams of flat land and a sky that meets the horizon. She dreams of days that are longer than the mountains’ peaks permit. It is amazing that the flatness of my own geographical reality could be someone else’s dream.

Morgan’s book evokes such a strong sense of place that I felt disoriented for the duration of my reading. Aloma’s experiences resisted me: I couldn’t imagine what it was like to be her. I couldn’t imagine what my own reactions would have been. I couldn’t even imagine what it must feel like to feel burdened by topography. In short, I was jolted from a comfortably narcissistic reading practice and could only (only!) try to understand Aloma, Orren, and Bell as separate characters, utterly distinct from me.

Perhaps this reveals me to be—generally—a “bad” reader: one who feels comfortable and relaxed with familiarity and disoriented and alert when confronted with the unfamiliar. Perhaps, too, it explains the number of negative reviews of Morgan’s novels: a surprising number of readers complained that “nothing happens.” But it also speaks to the subtle power of Morgan’s writing. She has created characters and situations that resist readerly co-option and a place that insists on its particularity. The effect was wonderful, and I can’t wait to reread this book and to read more by her in the future.

Written by: kristina grob, May 3rd 2010

Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States

admin — Sun, 02 May 2010 07:55:00 +0000

By Rickie Solinger, Paula C. Johnson, Martha L. Raimon, Tina Reynolds, Ruby C. Tapia

University of California Press

Surprise—it’s a real downer to read about prison. That glaringly obvious statement aside, Interrupted Life is quite an achievement. The book comprises eighty-seven pieces, which are written by scholars, activists, incarcerated women, and formerly incarcerated women and span breadth of generic types. There are poems, reflections, and essays; there are excerpts from research, a Bill of Rights, a United Nations Report; there are journal entries, excerpts from interviews, vocabulary lists, and letters to lovers. There are so many perspectives, experiences, reflections, assertions, and expressions that no one point of view is easily privileged, and the reader who may try to do so would have to try very hard to lump everything in this book into one picture of the "standard" incarcerated woman. This, of course, is one of the goals of this book: to resist readers' attempts to maintain a generalized view of who the incarcerated woman is or what she is like.

I admire the honesty of Ruby Tapia's introduction. She directly admits that any representation of incarcerated women—even of a single incarcerated woman—will necessarily fail to convey fully what her experience means to her and how it feels to her. Likewise, it will also fail to fully show how such a representation relates to the larger social, political, and economic problems of justice, the category of the "criminal," and the overwhelming homogeneity of economic class within prison populations. She insists that creating a representation of incarcerated women—even such a nuanced, heterogeneous representation as the book attempts—is still to reproduce the categorical violence done to incarcerated women by setting up a space in which "we" (non-incarcerated, non-criminal/criminalized readers) can take a leisurely look at "them"—"they" who exist outside of the laws that bind us into a group that can evaluate the criminalized other, who cannot evaluate us in ways that count.

Interrupted Life makes a provocative and accessible (if continually heartbreaking) book for the lay reader. The future professor in me can't help but imagine this book as a text for introductory level courses in philosophy, women's studies, multicultural studies, justice studies, political science, criminal justice, economics, or sociology. The readings are not too difficult for undergraduate students to understand and the many perspectives lend themselves to lessons in critical thinking. For advanced students, the readings in this book could challenge—or confirm—more highly theorized academic studies about justice, prisons, gender, and the experiences of incarceration.

Written by: kristina grob, May 2nd 2010

The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China

admin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:00:00 +0000

By Hannah Pakula

Simon and Schuster Press

No one will fail to notice this giant red book on your bookshelf. Nearly 800 pages long, containing two sections of photographs and spanning 137 years, Hannah Pakula’s biography of Soong May-ling, The Last Empress, better known to the world as Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the most famous wife of Chiang Kai-shek (the nationalist general who briefly united China before losing it to the communists organized under Mao Tse-tung) is a formidable conglomeration of information about many of the characters who had a hand in moving China from imperialism to communism. Readers looking for a concise, tightly organized, strategically written account of Madame’s life should look elsewhere: this book is dense with the stories of those whose lives and histories were entangled with the Chiang-Soong families and is as much a story of China as it is of Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

Unfortunately, Pakula’s style is not well suited to explaining concisely the complexities of Chinese political history in the early part of the twentieth century to the average, educated reader. This is not to say that Pakula obscures what is otherwise and elsewhere perfectly clear; the events and attitudes that initiated and characterized China’s shift from imperialism to nationalism to communism are difficult to outline cleanly.

Pakula takes a chronological approach to this biography, dividing the work into nine sections, each covering a span of several years. These sections, which are titled only according to the years they cover (which may be as few as two or as many as twenty-plus), are further broken down into chapters, the titles of which are only numbers. This chronological division is the only explicit structuring move Pakula makes, and she rarely offers her readers authorial ‘anchoring points’, which help the reader to orient her- or himself within the narrative structure. Certainly there is an overarching narrative—the intertwined trajectories of Madame Chiang Kai-shek and modern China—however, Pakula repeatedly interrupts her overarching narrative in order to insert interesting and gossipy anecdotes which can only be (thinly) justified by their chronological placement. This has the effect of flattening much of the narrative movement—important events don’t anchor the narrative or push it forward when surrounded by so many non-essential tidbits.

The story, whatever the flaws in the storytelling, is an enthralling one. Even when I grew frustrated with Pakula’s prose, I continued to read on... and on... and on. Pakula, who is carefully sympathetic to Soong May-ling, sometimes portrays her as a kind of feminist sympathizer, reinforcing May-ling’s articulate recognition of the political implications of women’s subordinate status. At other times, there are revelations of Madame’s hardness and cruelty: asked how China would respond to a difficult union leader, Madame remained silent and simply slid her hand across her throat. Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, whose political speeches charmed billions of dollars in U.S. loans to China; whose translating work for her husband helped to delay world recognition of some of his personal and political shortcomings; whose sex appeal was the subject of some amusingly purple journalism (“her teeth are visual symphonies of oral architecture.” Wow. Just wow.); who worked to improve conditions in hospitals and orphanages but spent thousands of dollars on furs and shoes and wore diamonds the size of buttons; who lived to be 105 and whose life spanned the entire twentieth century was a fascinating woman whose story could well fill several books. Pakula’s The Last Empress makes for a sometimes juicy, sometimes frustrating, but always eventful read.

Written by: kristina grob, February 8th 2010

How Perfect Is That

admin — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:02:00 +0000

By Sarah Bird

Pocket Books

How Perfect Is That is a story of becoming. When Blythe Young begins her tale, her world is in the process of crashing down around her. Though she married into a wealthy Texas family, her mother-in-law was one step ahead of her and insisted upon a prenuptial agreement—an agreement which carefully stipulated no provisions for Blythe in case of a divorce. Without any cash, Blythe tries to make ends meet by cutting (slashing) corners in her catering company, serving discount liver sausage as gourmet pâté and drugging her clients so they won't notice the difference. Everyone is after her—her clients, her staff (whom she can't afford to pay), the IRS—except for her family, her ex-husband, and her friends (apparently you really can't buy those). With the IRS literally dogging her heels, Blythe turns up at the doorstep of her college roommate and collapses, utterly exhausted.

What follows feels somewhat predictable. However, by this time, the reader might be curious to know how author Sarah Bird will subject Blythe to the consequences of her actions. At least, that is what happened to me. Blythe is cynical and irritating during the first third of the book. When it becomes clear to her that something's got to give and that she has to both appraise and change her life (her friends, her outlook, her direction, her drug habits, her values), she grows more interesting. It is entirely a testament to Bird's writing skill that Blythe's reorientation never feels sudden, clumsy, or didactic.

Blythe continues to make mistakes, but becomes a sympathetic character by the end of the book. She reinvents herself again, realizing that there is more than one way to escape an upbringing of which one is not proud. Perhaps this is not the next great novel, but it's not too bad either. It's perfect for a lazy weekend afternoon, as a traveling companion, or for the bathtub.

Written by: kristina grob, November 19th 2009

Resolving the Paradox of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Sexual Politics

admin — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:05:00 +0000

By Tamela Ice

University Press of America, Inc.

Professor Ice begins her book with what she calls a paradox within philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's social philosophy. In her words, “Rousseau's views on women sits [sic] in tension with his philosophy of freedom and equality.” That is, Professor Ice refers to the apparent discrepancy between Rousseau's vision of freedom for men and his endorsement of subordination for women. In the first chapter, Ice begins by exploring Rousseau's identity and sexual politics to determine Rousseau's definition (description would be better) of “woman.” Next, in the second chapter, she discusses what she considers Rousseau's overarching philosophical project—“the restoration of a sense of equality among men as men.” Thus, the question becomes: Does Rousseau's sexual politics undermine his larger project of restoring this sense of equality among men? In chapter three, Professor Ice moves to a discussion of the depiction of psychological alienation in literature to describe what happens to women when they are psychologically dependent and living in bad faith. In chapter four, Professor Ice directly employs selections from Simone de Beauvoir's oeuvreas a lens for refocusing interpretations of Rousseau.

I am sympathetic to the desire to connect Rousseau and Beauvoir. Indeed, stylistically, they are mutually sympathetic. Both Beauvoir and Rousseau have been lambasted by (some) feminists and other critics for insisting upon a status quo which they merely (brilliantly, feelingly) describe. It is not the case that there is no connection to be made between Rousseau and Beauvoir, it is simply that Ice never justifies her comparison. She never tells her reader why she chooses Beauvoir as a foil for Rousseau; she never explains why “bad faith” is something about which we ought to worry; she never explains why and how it is she justifies her anachronistic application of a twentieth century existentialist concept to an eighteenth century Enlightenment philosophy. Even if the reader were to set aside the lack of justification (and the regrettable editing errors), she must still contend with Ice's interpretation of Rousseau's sexual politics and social philosophy. Ice notes the masculine language Rousseau uses to discuss the civil “man,” but never looks at Rousseau's moral project (or even appears to recognize a moral project in Rousseau's work).

One might note a sort of progression in Rousseau's genealogy of human social development: wild, natural, civil, moral. The moral person is the culmination of Rousseau's project and the moral person comprises a man and a woman: in Emile, Rousseau claims that the community created by a woman and a man “produces a person...” (emphasis added). There is no moral humanity without women; men alone, as men, cannot be taken as the measure for (full) humanity.

Unfortunately, although Ice attempts a revision of Rousseau scholarship, there is nothing revisionary in her tired invocation of an illicit major premise: all men are human, no woman is a man, therefore, no woman is human. Rousseau doesn't take man, by himself, for the measure of humanity and doesn't measure women against men. When feminist academics employ such faulty logic, they disadvantage their scholarship and often miss subtleties that can be more fruitfully explored.

Written by: kristina grob, November 18th 2009

In Her Own Sweet Time: One Woman's Unexpected Adventures in Finding Love, Commitment, and Motherhood

admin — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:33:00 +0000

By Rachel Lehmann-Haupt

Basic Books

I read this book in one day. It, like the author, and like the problems she explores, is not perfect. Like the author, In Her Own Sweet Time is lovable and I eagerly devoured it for the stories she tells, the problems she outlines, and the social phenomena she identifies.

The question “What is the impact of new reproductive technologies (NRTs) on feminism?" is a recurring motif within this book. On the one hand, women have the unprecedented opportunity to choose when and how to become mothers—with a partner, with donor sperm, through intrauterine insemination, through in vitro fertilization or with the help of a surrogate. Women can freeze eggs at the peak of fertility for later use, and can freeze fertilized eggs for transplantation. Lehmann-Haupt describes all of these reproductive tools and her experience with them. I was delighted to see her go further and wonder about how they relate to feminism—its history, aims, and future. Women are ‘liberated’ to do it all and "on our own" (for "on our own" read: with an entire medical team. Ahem). The author wants to know whether is it okay—whether is it feminist—to want a partner, to desire love, and to hope for relationship and commitment.

Lehmann-Haupt does unwittingly import some of the old liberal feminist zero-sum assumptions about gender, which blunts the edge of her musing on the relationship between NRTs and feminism. Here, like many 1980s feminists that argued access to abortion makes women more like men and may be problematic to feminism, Lehmann-Haupt wonders if access to NRTs makes women more like men, and so may be problematic to feminism. Both arguments claim that the procedures in question—abortion and NRTs—allow women to deny their biological nature. It’s a convoluted syllogism: women's biological nature includes motherhood; men's biological nature does not include motherhood; when women act against their biological nature to preclude motherhood they are (acting) like men. No, it's not perfect, but hey, it's not my logic.

The fact that Lehmann-Haupt makes such a claim (that egg freezing allows women to deny their biological nature) now, decades past the Sex Wars of the 1980s and all of those old essentialism debates and appears unaware of the problems of this claim is noteworthy. It indicates that the question and meaning of nature is still a problem for feminism, and therefore, for American culture generally. There is still difficulty in developing a robust conception of what woman is and can be that allows for motherhood, but does not require it for "real" womanhood.

That being said, I definitely recommend In Her Own Sweet Time. It is refreshing to read about a woman who is struggling with questions about commitment, love, motherhood, technology, and feminism, and who is able to live with those struggles, say imperfect (but often very good) things, go on safari, travel with friends, date and cope with disappointment, and take her own sweet time with all of it.

Written by: kristina grob, September 23rd 2009